'Annie Mae' Cartoons: Saturday Mornings Were Never Like This

MOVIES - DRIVE-IN FU

March 27, 1992|By Joe Bob Briggs

I'm not sure what's going on here, but have you watched any of these Japaheeno guns-and-hooters cartoon movies?

''Annie Maes,'' they call 'em, and they used to be in the children's section of video stores until children started taking 'em home and Mom would come into the room and see nekkid women flying through space with rockets strapped to their back, lasering enemy aliens so they can travel through time to save their lesbo lovers, and she goes ''What the heck are you watching! Turn that thing off!''

And the kids would whine, ''Oh, Mom, it's just cartoons from Japan.''

And pretty soon after that all the Annie Maes got taken off the children's shelves, and now they have big ole stickers that say ''Contains Nudity'' and ''Adult Subject Matter.''

I just finished watching about eight hours of these babies, and I have to say I can understand why every 15-year-old boy has bought 30 of these in the last year. All of these flicks - not just most of 'em but every single one of 'em - are about beautiful teen-age girls who wear French-cut bikinis and leather while they're blowing stuff up to save the world.

In fact, there's basically one plot for every Annie Mae flick:

The story takes place in the future where a new city has been built on the ashes of a city that was blown to smithereens by evil men.

Two girls with superhuman powers like to giggle a lot, go to school and soak in the hot tub together.

A third girl, who wears too much leather, is jealous of their love and tries to steal one of them away.

The Earth is about to be blown up by aliens with enormous robot machines.

The only people who can defeat the robot machines are our two superhuman girls, helped by the third girl, who decides it's more important to save the world than to get revenge on her rival.

So they all travel into space or they travel through time or they do some other Star Trek-type deal or they get inside a giant robot - this part has a lot of variations - and they kill all the evil men who want to destroy the world.

Oh yeah, in the middle of the last crisis, one of them decides to die for the other one because they can't stand to be apart.

So basically the story here is that the world is nearly destroyed by greed, and then it's saved by love.

The latest hooters-and-twisted-metal cartoon from Yokohama is Project A-ko, the story of a bubblehead 17-year-old at an all-girl high school who is so cute and giggly that two girls start fighting over her. One girl's name is A-ko, another B-ko and another C-ko. A-ko is friends with C-ko. B-ko is jealous and wants C-ko for herself. So B-ko does what any red-blooded Japanese high school girl would do: She builds giant robots with heat-seeking missiles in their arms to destroy A-ko.

Meanwhile, an alien spaceship is on its way to Earth to kidnap C-ko and take her back to her proper place as princess of another planet. I think you can see what's developing here. Anybody could figure out the rest:

Giant mechanical spiders invade Earth so that C-ko can be tied up and taken to a distant space station, bawling all the way. But A-ko sneaks into the

space station, fights a she-male samurai and makes her way to the bridge where an alcoholic enemy commander is screaming, ''Booze! I need booze!''

Nine thousand explosions later, the girls go giggling down the street again, hand in hand, on their way to high school English class.

And we wonder why the Japanese are winning the economic battle.

Besides this one, I recommend a series called Dominion: Tank Police (violent cat sisters in bikinis, who escape from the cops by doing a strip-tease and attempt to infect the whole world with AIDS); The Humanoid (a buxom android named Antoinette falls in love and saves the world from the madman who unlocks the secrets of the ancient Mayan pyramids); and GunBuster (two girls join the Imperial Earth Space Force, sail into space, activate something called a ''black hole bomb'' that destroys billions of enemy ships and return to Earth 12,000 years after they left, having missed all their high school reunions).